Qantas is back at it again, navigating international lockdowns to ferry Australians home.

The airline has and will be chartering several flights to pick up stranded Aussies on other continents, Foreign Minister Marise Payne confirmed on Thursday, revealing an entire planeful are already in-bound from the Chilean capital Santiago.

“The flight is bringing Australians out of Lima, Cuzco and Quito,” Payne said, revealed two different planes had been sweeping South America to round them up. “Then one flight from Latam [Airlines] will bring people to Melbourne.”

That particular flight left Santiago on Thursday morning, carrying 280 Australians and four New Zealanders, with Payne saying the federal government had been “trying to assist New Zealanders as much we can”. All will be quarantined for 14 days when they arrive in order to detect any signs of the virus among the cohort.

“There have been challenges with Australians being in quite remote locations around Peru. As best as we have been able in the lockdown context, the Australian Embassy in Lima has used local transport as a means to try to bring as many of those to a flight centre as we can,” she said.

Those Australians who take up the government’s offer have been asked to pay around $2,500 to get a seat.

“Where there is a real difficulty for Australians to afford those flights, we have of course encouraged them to engage with friends and family,” Payne said. “We also do have provision for travel emergency loans and high commissioners and ambassadors are making that clear to Australians who are dealing with the challenge of returning.”

Payne said South America had been a particular focus given the difficulty of transiting back to Australia from there amid the current travel restrictions in place around the world. A cursory search turns up regular flights from Santiago to Melbourne costing more than $6,000 and requiring stopovers in countries as diverse as Ireland, Germany and the United Arab Emirates in order to get back.

Other chartered flights have already been planned. One Qantas flight is expected to depart Lima early next week, while another will transport Australians from South Africa.

While not specifying details, Payne also alluded to another flight to come from Argentina and revealed the government is in negotiations with governments from India, Cambodia, the Philippines and Lebanon to coordinate similar emergency flights from those regions in the coming weeks.

It comes after Qantas was charged with evacuating hundreds of Australians from Wuhan, the virus’ epicentre in China, earlier this year, and dumping them on Christmas Island for quarantine.

The next set of passengers, it’s imagined, will be far happier with their Melbourne boltholes.

Follow Business Insider Australia on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.